Blood Magic (16 page)

“Nothing, it’s nothing. Did you say
hammers
, plural?”

“Yeah. For drama club. We—actually, you, oh member of the stage crew—need to make some platforms for the show this week after school.”

“Joy.” I sipped the surprisingly good coffee and stepped forward to inspect the hammers hanging from their little metal hooks. They varied in size from as short as my hand to as long as my forearm. What did you do with a tiny hammer? There
were wooden handles and heavy plastic handles. Some painted, some not. It occurred to me that I really didn’t need to know there were so many varieties of hammer. So I spun around and faced Eric while he shopped, as if one hammer wouldn’t do as well as another. “Can I ask you something that’s going to sound weird?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Did you ever hear strange things about my grandpa?”

“Mr. Harleigh?” Eric flicked his eyes at me, then shrugged again. “Sure. He lived alone next to a cemetery, man. What weird crap
didn’t
we talk about?”

“So it was all made up.”

The look he gave me said,
Seriously?

“Look, I didn’t know him.”

“And you just want some colorful stuff to fill in the blanks.”

“Got it in one.”

“Okay, here was the best one. Ready?” He went all still, so that the only motion was the steam still rising from his coffee. Then he said in a low, half-whispered voice, “They say Mr. Harleigh was two hundred years old when he died. That for a half dozen generations he used the bones out in the cemetery to make a potion of immortality, but gave it up when—” He paused, glancing away guiltily, as if realizing he was about to say something bad about my family.

I stopped holding my breath and shook myself. “When what?”

All the dramatic affectation fell off him. “When your mom lost it.”

“Oh.” Goose bumps screamed down my arms. But I tried
to play it off with a wry smile. “Well, she did pretty much go nutso.”

Eric clapped me on the shoulder, looking relieved. “Yeah. We all know. Glad you do, too.”

“It was pretty hard to miss.”

“You should watch out, too.”

“What, like it runs in the family? Don’t worry. My dad is the most boringly sane person on the planet.”

“No, dude.” Eric grinned. “Not genes. The cemetery.”

“The cemetery?”

“It’s like a vortex of evil.” His face lit up. “There’ve been stories about that cemetery forever. My grandma used to talk about the animals avoiding the place—like cows and horses and dogs and stuff—and about seeing strange lights. And think about it. Who lives near the cemetery, and in the last thirty years, who are the only people to have gone crazy and/or been viciously murdered within a hundred miles?”

Coffee turned sour in my stomach. “When you put it that way.”

Eric laughed. “Gives you something else to think about when you’re gazing longingly at Silla.”

I didn’t want him to be, but Eric was right. And he didn’t even know about the magic.

Crows flapped lazily a dozen feet from my parents’ graves. Reese and I had tossed an old loaf of bread for them, in several chunks, to keep them around. They seemed content to hop and chatter at each other as they argued over crumbs. Overhead, a
solid sheet of blue stretched. All around us, the world rolled away in golden colors, and here we were in the cemetery, surrounded by crumbling headstones and patches of dying grass.

I lay on the ground in the center of a circle of salt and candles.

My blood rushed and throbbed in my fingers and toes, and the grass prickled at my skin. Squeezing my eyes closed, I breathed in and out, concentrating on the motion of my diaphragm. I dug my fingernails into the earth. It smelled cool and fresh. The spell burned through my veins, and my head ached like I’d been hung upside down and shaken.

But the magic wasn’t working.

I let out a sigh and tried to relax, to melt into the ground and let go of myself.

“No luck?” Reese asked.

“Clearly!”

“It isn’t like you’re learning to draw a triangle. This is a whole new language, Sil.”

I opened my eyes. The bright blue sky framed Reese’s head so that I couldn’t see his actual expression to know how serious he was. I guessed not very, and stuck out my tongue.

He laughed.

“I want to do it!” I pushed up to sit. “Everything else has come to me, why not this? I feel—I feel it rushing through me, from the top of my head”—I touched the flaky blood drawn onto my forehead—“to my hands.” I showed him the blood runes he’d drawn on my palms. “It’s pounding with my heartbeat and I want it. God, Reese, I …”

“Maybe you want it too much.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Dad says
willpower
and
belief
. Wanting it more should make it easier.”

“So part of you doesn’t believe this should be possible.”

I chewed on the inside of my lip. “It’s … different from everything else. The other spells were about affecting other things, not myself. This is like throwing myself away.”

Reese snorted. “You just like who you are, Silla. You’ve always been like that. Known who you are.”

“I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Reese’s face fell into thoughtfulness. “Are you afraid?”

Was I afraid? The idea made me shift uncomfortably on the cool ground. “Are you?”

“I don’t think so. Think what I could learn by spending time in an animal’s body. Flying, or hunting with a fox …” He turned his face toward the forest.

I gripped his hand. “You could lose yourself. How can a crow hold a whole person? My soul?”

He shook his head and turned back to me. “No, there isn’t a physical manifestation of the soul—not like it has mass. It should be able to rest on the head of a pin, like all the angels.”

Despite the sun, I shivered. The crows jerked and bobbed, oblivious of us.

“I’ll try,” he said. “I’m not worried about losing myself.”

I heaved in a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Trade.” I very slowly got to my feet and stepped out of the circle. My knees wavered, and the cemetery ground tilted.

Reese caught my hand. “Whoa, Sil.”

“I’m totally dizzy.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah. I was trying really hard, and could feel the magic trying to work. Draining me.” Reese steadied me as I knelt and leaned my back against Mom and Dad’s headstone. “God, I’m nauseated, too.”

“Dad has this note about that, did you see it?”

“Yeah.”

Reese read it aloud anyway. “ ‘Recommend ginger or chamomile tea to settle stomach after possession. Can have deleterious effect upon body. Water and sugar for head.’ There’s raisins and cookies in the bag.”

He handed me the backpack and I dug out our water bottle and a plastic bag of raisins. “Ugh.” I wasn’t hungry.

“Drink.”

“I guess my body doesn’t like the idea of being an empty shell.”

“Smart of it.”

“Bleh.” I opened the bag and pulled out a couple of raisins.

“My turn. You have the knife?” Reese leaned back onto his haunches inside the circle. I handed him the pocketknife and watched as he slashed his palm. Wrinkling his lips, he said, “It’s too bad about the rabbit blood.”

The blood had coagulated into a disgusting, lumpy Jell-O. Instead of scraping it out of the Tupperware, I’d tossed the whole thing. Poor, wasted bunny. “Maybe we should stick with our own. To make it a real sacrifice, you know? Like Dad says. But I wish we could ask him.”

Reese cupped his palm. “Yeah, and at least we know where it’s been.”

I reached out and tentatively put my finger in the scarlet pool. It was warm and sticky and gross. I winced, but painted a shaky rune on Reese’s forehead. With his free hand, he pulled down the collar of his sweater. I painted the same rune over his heart and palms. Then Reese moved his bleeding hand out and let his blood drip in a circle around him, reinforcing the ring of salt already in place. It was supposed to let the soul more easily find its way back to the body, according to one of Dad’s arrow points. And those were all the ingredients for this one. Blood, fire for transformation, imagination, and a few little Latin words. I’d noticed that most of the instantaneous spells required less ritual. It was the things meant to last, like warding charms and potions for health and fortune, that took time and planning.

Folding a piece of washcloth, I pressed it against Reese’s palm. “So relax, and say the chant. Just focus on the syllables and then imagine yourself in the bird.”

“I read the spell, too, Sil.” Reese closed his eyes. “And you tried quite a bit, so I got to hear the chant several times.”

I smacked his arm. “It was hard, okay?”

“Uh-huh.” Reese took a deep, slow breath and folded his hands together in his lap with the bloody towel between them. As he relaxed, his jaw loosened and his eyelashes fluttered. A breeze flicked at his bangs, and my skin lifted into goose pimples. I glanced over to where the crows flapped about, and wished the sun was less bright. The bread was nearly gone. The flock played here all the time, veering toward our house
frequently enough that when I’d been little, I’d named them all. Different birds, of course, and I probably couldn’t really tell them apart, but I was six, so no one said otherwise.

Reese’s breath changed suddenly, becoming shallower and faster, like he was trying to match his breathing to the bird’s. Then, without any warning, his whole body relaxed. His head lolled and his fingers loosened. He slumped backward.

The candles went out.

I scrambled closer. He’d done it!

The crows flapped their wings and I swung my head to them. Dizziness swept up from my stomach. Pushing my fists into my belly, I swallowed it back, and looked carefully through narrow eyes. One crow had frozen. As I watched, it shook itself, hopped up onto a headstone, and then slowly blinked its inner eyelids. A cloud passed over the sun, casting us in shade, and the crow suddenly flapped its wings and shuddered. It leapt from the marble and flew out over the cemetery.

The rest of the crows cawed and cackled and chased after it. I stood, using Mom and Dad’s stone for support. Too quickly I lost track of which of the spinning and diving birds was my brother. I walked as close to the salt circle as I could get without disturbing it. Reese’s chest rose and fell slowly, like he was in a deep sleep. I thought again of souls.
I’m not worried about losing myself
, he’d said. I wondered if that was because he wanted to.

It was nice to see his face calm and peaceful. Some days I thought I wanted to feel more than I did, to break out of my numbness as if it was a shell. But Reese felt everything. My share, too. It made him throw things and drink too much and
sleep with ex-girlfriends who he didn’t really like in the first place.

The earth dropped out from under me, and I clutched at the nearest gravestone. I had to eat one of those damn cookies, and get to the water. Why couldn’t I do this one? I’d made a hundred flowers bloom without trying, like the power in my blood had awakened completely and was starved for magic. But now … now I was failing.

Suddenly Reese’s body lurched up. His hips lifted off the ground, and his eyes flew open. Then he collapsed and laughed. He flung out his arms, destroying the circle. “Silla! Oh my God.”

My heart sank back down into my chest where it belonged. He was okay.

Flipping onto his stomach, Reese grinned. “Silla, it was amazing. I was flying. The wind was as thick as water under my wings. I couldn’t fall—there wasn’t enough weight in the world to push me down!”

“Wow,” I whispered, trying and failing not to be completely jealous.

He nodded, and pushed to his knees. His head turned until he found the crow he’d abandoned, hopping jerkily in a circle. “I can hardly think of how to tell you—I just knew what things meant. And”—he closed his eyes—“the colors were … the trees were a million different greens, the sky—God, the sky. Not blue but blue-white-silver-green-blue-blue-blue—there isn’t a name for it. Wind in my feathers, dipping, spinning, swirling, always knowing what was up, where the clouds were, what was too high, and my wings—my wings!—my muscles and bones
remembered how to move, my feet tucked up.” Reese swayed in place, opened his eyes. “Whoa. Dizzy.” He reached out for me and I caught his hand. He looked like a little boy.

“That sounds amazing.”

“It was. You’ll get it. I’ll help you.” He squeezed my hand. I pulled him out of the circle and shoved the bag of cookies into his lap.

When I arrived at the graveyard, Silla and her brother were sitting together snacking on cookies. They both wore jeans and sweaters and had blood on their foreheads. Like a gruesome splotch jerking you out of an otherwise pastoral scene. That happened to be a cemetery. Okay, it was all pretty gruesome.

I lifted my hand and said, “Hi.”

Silla slowly got to her feet. Her eyes were pinched as if her head hurt. “Hey, Nick. This is my brother, Reese.”

Also standing, Reese held out his hand. “Hey.”

I shook it, and was glad he didn’t do any of those macho competitive hand-squeezing things. “Nice to meet you.” He was bigger than me in every way except height. But he stood casually, like a guy who gets his size from actually working, not from spending hours in epic battles with weight machines.

“You too.” Reese leaned his butt against the headstone, arms folded across his chest.

Normally, I’d have made some comment about his attitude being big enough to hold the headstone up without the help of his ass, but I didn’t want to piss him off right away. Or piss Silla off.

“Hungry?” Silla asked. She was still standing, her hands clutched together in front of her. A blue strip of cloth was tied around her left hand.

I wanted to kiss her. It had been somewhere around fifteen hours since the last time. I wanted to take her face in my hands and kiss until I couldn’t breathe. But instead I just shook my head. “Thanks, but I’m good.”

“We were resting, eating. This spell is pretty tiring. Want to sit?” She gestured at the ground, her gaze following her hand.

I glanced down at the edge of the salt circle. The chunky crystals glittered like diamonds in the sun. There wasn’t anything I wanted to say that I could say to Reese, too. “So. Magic. What have you done today?”